I’m joking with the meme, but it’s an interesting how plot armor unintentionally places value on people’s lives in fiction.
It’s telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn’t acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that’s normalized in things like Samurai Jack.
Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they’ll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who’s acting like how we understand humans.
I feel like there’s something dangerous in how easily we can depict appropriate targets of violence. Not just robots, but anybody deemed as less than human are allowed to be more put at risk.
Unnamed people are killed in superhero fights all the time. But unless they are of a class of characters like protagonists, they are collateral damage at best.
I think Plot Armor as a trope needs more class consciousness and awareness around how deciding who gets to be protected is often an unconscious political belief.
What about you though? Any tropes in media you’d like to see explored more or written with a leftist understanding?
I’m tired of The Fall. I get it, everything was great until
the Fire Nation attackedMelkor can’t hold a tunesomebody ate some fruit from a tree you put there you duncea terrible thing happened and now we’re trying to regain ourmojolife essencekidnapped princessD E S T I N Y. Similarly, I’m tired of Precursors in science fiction. Cool, you found some ruins fromSpace Romansan ancient civilization! such wow, what old, so mystery, smol feels.Both cases would do well to get Historically Materialist.
Series idea: scientists find ruins of an alien civilization, but all of the most enduring ruins are Bronze Age mega structures made from stone. All of the technology that they had is scraps that have been blasted away by thousands of years of decay and the scientists have to make guesses based on ice core samples of when they started their industrial revolution and how far along they got and why the whole thing collapsed.
This would be an excellent space horror as they increasingly question why their species/civilization made it past whatever event they are trying to study.
In the last episode, the leading scientist sums up everything they’ve discovered: “At first we thought it was an asteroid impact, then we thought it was nuclear war, but now we’re pretty sure they cooked themselves with greenhouse gasses and their space colony failed once the resupply missions stopped getting sent.”
Then it turns out the aliens were humanity all along
this is mass effect pretty much
“Alright, so uh, it looks like maybe it was space global warming? Like the evil bad robot gods are trying to stop the literal end of this galaxy while still leaving life alone while it’s not actively destroying the literal stars?”
“Well, uh, no, actually. We talked to their devs and uh, it turns out they’re just really fucking stupid.”
“What?”
“Yeah they just suck a lot, that’s their whole thing. The robots are really fucking stupid and they’re doing the dumbest thing they could and they’re so fucking stupid that even though they know they shouldn’t be doing this they don’t have an off switch so they just keep doing it.”
“What?”
“Yeah…”
The Reality Dysfunction book series has a “dead” alien civilization
spoilers below
spoiler
that committed mass suicide to keep their dead from demon possessing the living and taking over the universe.
I get it but like we just figured out how to make concrete as good as the Roman’s like a year ago. Anyone borne before ww1 would have looked at roman mechanical engineering as a marvel. Still in places in America today come to that. So the fall is actually the most realistic trope. Just look at our highways in America made by our grandparents. We couldn’t do that today.
Yes we can. It’s called state intervention. It doesn’t happen now because the current state has been hollowed out by capital to the point of minimal functionality in the u.s.
We can easily look to our contemporaries in China and see them doing shit exactly like what happened back then and then some extra because of the technological difference between the 1950s to now.
Yeah, but we aren’t China. We can’t do it.